The Misunderstanding of J. R. Smith

Basketball’s most unpredictable talent continues to captivate and confuse.

Smith’s dynamic on-court talent has often been stymied by a reputation for impulsiveness.

Illustration by Rebecca Clarke

J. R. Smith, who has played in the National Basketball Association for most of the past twelve years, has, in that time, been responsible for some of the league’s most unpredictable pleasures and diversions, both on and off the court. As a player, he has a singular talent for making improbable long-range shots that perhaps he shouldn’t be taking. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has written that Smith possesses the N.B.A.’s “most diversified portfolio of infractions,” having violated league policies and municipal laws related to marijuana and motor scooters, among other things. Like the Red Sox legend Manny Ramirez, who once high-fived a fan while turning a double play, or the soccer star Luis Suárez, who periodically bites his opponents on the pitch, Smith, who has been traded four times and spent a season in China, is best known for his ability to captivate and confuse.

Consider an incident from January, 2014, when Smith was a member of the New York Knicks. While lined up along the free-throw lane, awaiting an opposing player’s foul shots, Smith untied the shoelaces of Shawn Marion, of the Dallas Mavericks—reaching down slowly, as if to rest his hands on his knees, before making a quick and successful yank, just before play resumed, so Marion had no time to do anything about it. This led to a warning from the league. Days later, Smith made an attempt at the laces of Greg Monroe, of the Detroit Pistons; Monroe, perhaps sensing Smith’s intentions, turned his enormous shoe away just in time. Smith earned a fifty-thousand-dollar fine and widespread ridicule.

This past June, Smith’s most recent team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, trailed the favored Golden State Warriors two games to none in the N.B.A. Finals. Then Smith scored twenty points in the critical third game, making five three-pointers, often with defenders pressed against his muscular, six-foot-six-inch frame. These were the kinds of shots that Smith’s fans both love and fear, heaved desperately off one leg or with his whole body fading away as time runs out, in a manner inspired, Smith has said, by his favorite video game, NBA 2K. Smith has two seven-year-old daughters, Peyton and Demi; before Game 6, Demi said to an ESPN reporter, about her dad, “I’m just proud of him because he made the championship without getting kicked off the team.” Smith made four more threes that night, and the Cavaliers won, staving off elimination. Then they won Game 7, and Smith, for the first time in his career, was a champion. At an emotional press conference, he spoke about his own parents, particularly his father. “To hear people talk bad about me, it hurts me because I know it hurts him. It’s not who I am. And I know he raised better, and I know I want to do better.”

The next day, Smith arrived with his teammates in Cleveland, and disembarked the team plane bare-chested and ebullient. He was shirtless for much of the next week—eventually, President Obama asked him, in a congratulatory phone call to his coach, “to put on a shirt.” You can now buy, for thirty-five dollars, a skin-toned “tattoo shirtless shirt” covered with the abundant art inked on Smith’s torso: the black Jesus; the image of his mother, Ida; the No. 23 jersey that pays homage to Michael Jordan; the words “my time to shine” around his neck; the doves in midflight. “Expect some imperfections around seams and folds,” Fresh Brewed Tees, who sells the shirt, warns on its Web site. “Some smudges or white streaks may appear near edges, seams and collars and are normal.” To fans of Smith, it’s a fitting disclaimer: imperfections are a large part of his appeal.

On September 9th, Smith turned thirty-one, and he spent the day with friends, family, and neighbors in the Perrineville section of the grassy New Jersey township of Millstone, near where he grew up. Smith, who got married this summer, to Demi’s mother (“Two rings in one year,” he proclaimed on social media), is now a free agent, holding out for a bigger contract. LeBron James, Smith’s teammate last season and a close friend, conveyed his birthday wishes on Instagram. “I’ve always believed in you,” James wrote, beneath a picture of the two spraying champagne after winning the title. “Quite frankly, more than u believed in yourself at times and I’ve never wavered cause i knew what you were all about. Loyal, caring, driven, misunderstood.”

It was an exciting day in Millstone: Smith, who is a shoe “enthusiast,” as he put it—he owns more than a thousand pairs—was there to open his new boutique sneaker store, Team Swish. (“Swish” is one of Smith’s nicknames.) The store sits on a three-and-a-half-acre property that’s been in Smith’s family for fifty-five years. When the original family home burned down, three decades ago, Smith’s father, Earl, a mason contractor, replaced it with an office building, which J.R. helped build. The building is now a three-unit strip mall, with a consignment shop, called Ida’s Place, run by Smith’s mother; a coffee and bagel spot; and, in between, Team Swish.

Smith pulled up to the strip mall’s parking lot at around 3 P.M. in a red Ferrari that he bought after Cleveland won the title. Smith’s younger brother Chris was riding shotgun; the car looked like a space ship in the horse-dotted countryside. Smith wore jeans, a white collared shirt, and his Nike Air Force Ones. (“I wanted to keep it real simple, not stand out too much,” he told me later.) We headed into a small office in his new store, to chat. Demi periodically wandered in to sit on his lap; autograph seekers and old family friends dropped by. Smith apologized for the intrusions, never rushing our hour-long talk, carefully considering his responses to questions. Earl manned the register out front, where swarms of kids and adults bought J. R. Smith bobble-heads, Sprayground backpacks, T-shirts with the player’s likeness, and, of course, basketball shoes.

Growing up in Millstone, Smith was one of only a handful of African-American students at his school. For most of his adolescence, he was something of a loner, with few friends outside his extended family. “People were cool with me,” he said, “but they played me from afar: talking, making jokes about me. As a kid, it’s hurtful. People look at me now and think, He was definitely a bully. He was that guy. And I’m like, ‘No, it wasn’t like that.’ People don’t understand why I play, sometimes, with a chip on my shoulder. And that’s one reason: the fact I got bullied.” In high school, Smith grew to his current height and became a standout baseball, basketball, and football player. During his senior year, he was co-M.V.P. at the 2004 McDonald’s All American Game, where a promising young player named Carmelo Anthony urged him to skip college, impressed by his swagger and dominance. Smith took the advice seriously, and, later that year, he was selected eighteenth over all in the N.B.A. draft, by the New Orleans Hornets (now the New Orleans Pelicans).

During J.R.’s first two years in the league, his father lived with him in New Orleans, in a house that J.R. bought, enforcing most of the rules his other children obeyed in Millstone. “I bought a house and cars, but I was sleeping in the guest room,” J.R. told me. “My dad got the master!” He had a curfew: midnight if there was no game the next day, otherwise earlier. When the veteran players invited him somewhere, he’d say, “I gotta call my dad.” His father had final say on cars, too. “I wanted to get this BMW that had just come out,” a model that his friend Dwight Howard, who went first in the draft, had just purchased. “My pops said, ‘No. He was the No. 1 pick. You were eighteen. You’re gonna work for that.’ ”

Smith put up decent numbers in his first few seasons, but he was criticized for poor shot selection and questionable decision-making. One of his first coaches, George Karl, said, of Smith’s play, “I just love the dignity of the game being insulted right in front of me.” After several years in Denver, and one in China, Smith was acquired by the Knicks, in 2012. In his first full season with the team, he won the Sixth Man of the Year Award, given to the league’s best bench player. But there were signs of an impending collapse. He’d helped get his younger brother Chris on the team, and then posted the word “betrayal” on Instagram after the Knicks cut him. (Smith says the post was unrelated.) He’d thrown an elbow at the Celtics’ Jason Terry during the Knicks’ playoff run, in 2013, which earned him a game suspension that nearly cost the team the series.

“Nothing I did in New York was working by the end, before going to Cleveland,” he told me. He couldn’t get the balance right between work and life. “At one point I thought I was at the gym too much.” He’d spend hours there working on his fundamentals, but it didn’t help. “So I started going out a lot, thinking I was taking the game too seriously. Then I partied too much. That wasn’t working. So I started messing with this girl, changing things up relationship-wise. That wasn’t working. Then I was having trouble with my daughter’s mom. And I’m like, Man, what’s going on? I couldn’t get out of my own way. I tried to have fun on the court, pulling somebody’s shoestring: fifty-thousand-dollar fine. I’d been doing that for years. Then the weed: suspended five games. It was like, This thing will not stop.”

On the subject of shoelaces, Smith became almost agitated, leaning forward in his swivel chair, his sleepy eyes widening. “Dwight was untying laces for four or five years,” he said, “but nobody said anything! They’re just like, ‘Look how much Dwight enjoys the game!’ Then I do it, and the same people are like, ‘Look at J.R.: he doesn’t take the game seriously.’ Why is it that Dwight loves the game and I don’t? Why can’t I have that much fun playing? How can you say one person can do something and another can’t? Because he gets paid more? Smiles bigger?”

A young boy tiptoed into the room, with his mother, to ask for an autograph, and one for his grandma, too, who, he said, was a big fan. Smith happily obliged, performing the name-signing ritual with what appeared to be genuine pleasure. After they left, Smith continued. “When I was the best player growing up, my dad never treated me like I was special. Nobody treated me that way, until I got to the N.B.A. To this day, probably one reason they call me a knucklehead is that I can’t understand: Why can’t you treat everybody the same?”

Lately, Smith has spent a lot of time reading. “There’s a book called ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals.’ It’s amazing,” he said. The book is by the economist Thomas Sowell, who grew up in Harlem in the nineteen-forties and is now a fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford. “I was talking to ’Bron, James Jones, and a couple guys in the locker room—a lot of us like to read—tossing around ideas about books and, from a political standpoint, how people came to be ‘ghetto’ or ‘urban.’ That book has twisted my mind. ‘Ghetto’ was first used to describe white folks!”

Smith would like to speak out, as his friends LeBron and Carmelo have recently, about police violence against African-Americans. But he worries about how he’d be interpreted. “I can’t say what I want and how I want,” he told me. “Because it’s me. When I try to explain myself or express myself, it seems to come off the wrong way. Like, when I was in New York, four or five years ago, the anniversary of September 11th comes up and I make an Instagram post for all the people who died, to celebrate their lives.” The post read, “Celebrate the deaths of the people in 9/11!” “I was trying to say, We shouldn’t mourn as much. We should celebrate their legacies,” Smith explained. “Don’t get me wrong: it’s terrible what happened. The families going through it still—it’s horrible. But we should celebrate. That’s what I said. And the way it was interpreted by the New York Post was ‘Yay! They knocked down the towers!’ ”

For a few years, Smith’s business partners have been trying to fund a reality-television show about him, which—according to one rationale—would help correct misperceptions. “That show was something I was going to do when I was in New York,” he told me. During the N.B.A. Finals, a fund-raising campaign for the show appeared on Kickstarter. Smith says he wasn’t behind it, and doesn’t particularly care whether the show ever comes to fruition. “But now it doesn’t matter what other people say or think or do, as long as my daughters know what’s going on, how I feel about them,” Smith said. “I used to say it all the time: ‘I don’t care what people think.’ Well, I did. But, at this point, I’ve got my family, who’ve been my friends my whole life. They know where my heart is.”

I asked Smith what he thought his legacy would be. “I’m not going to the Hall of Fame,” he said, chuckling. “I want to turn this place”—he gestured around us—“into a kid’s club, where they can play video games, get a tutor, shoot pool, learn to play soccer or cheerleading. When I was young, I had so much I wanted to do. I didn’t have people who could help all the time, though. I’ve loved video games my whole life, but I never really had a way to tap into that. Now I can call a guy at NBA 2K and give him advice. It’s dope for a kid to have a different outlook, to love technology or design at nine years old. By the time the kid is twenty, who knows what he’ll come up with,” he continued. “Kids really are our future, and we have to invest in them. They’ll turn into us, and we’ll turn into old people, and then it’s over.”

We headed outside for the official ribbon-cutting. Smith handed the giant scissors to Demi and to his nephew Jaeshon, who cut the ceremonial tape stretched between two chairs placed in front of the store. “A few words, J.R.?” Earl said. “Speech! Speech!” others chanted. Smith paused, seemingly to search for a way out of the spotlight, then said, “Team Swish, open.” Soon, thirty people were singing him “Happy Birthday” under a tent outside, next to his Ferrari. Children posed for photos and ate cake; adults smoked cigars. Smith swiped some frosting off a messy child’s face, ate it, and then headed for the relative quiet of Ida’s Place.

In front of the consignment store, which sold a few of his old jerseys, Smith hopped on his daughter’s tiny purple bike. “Kids get me,” he said. “You know the animal question? The dolphin is my favorite animal. It’s graceful. When it jumps out of the water, it’s one of the most peaceful things you can see. Especially when the sun is hitting off the water. There’s something just so calm and peaceful about it. At the same time, if it goes down, a dolphin is like, O.K., let’s go.” He smiled. “I’m a dolphin. That’s all people need to know.”

Charles Bethea is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and has written for The New Yorker since 2008.